'FIFA 12' security update to arrive this week

FIFA 12 will receive a security update this week for FIFA Ultimate Team and EA Sports Football Club.

The update will enact a number of changes to ensure user security from phishing and hacking attempts.

It will now only be possible to send trade offers to people on your friends list.

On entering FUT on your console for the first time after the update, you will be required to provide a unique answer to a security question.

If anyone else attempts to enter your FUT account from a different console, they will be required to enter the answer to your security question.

EA has also urged users to protect their personal information.

"You should never reveal your security question and answer to anyone, especially on a website other than the 'ea.com' domain. Never give out your username or password. Never share your login credentials (eg: email address and password) for any reason," EA said.

"EA representatives will never ask you for your password. Non-EA individuals and/or websites that ask for your login information in exchange for discounted goods (eg: free virtual items) or other game-related services should not be trusted."

The update will also fix a number of bugs, including one that caused end-of-game disconnects for some FIFA Ultimate Team users.

"For some time now, a number of FUT gamers on PlayStation 3 and PC have suffered disconnections at the end of games. This was a problem associated with certain types of router hardware that resulted in very small but very important bits of data being blocked at the conclusion of a game," they explained.

"We will be deploying a fix for this problem as part of this update."

Users who were affected by the disconnect issues will receive "a haul of FUT content significant enough to demonstrate just how thankful we are for sticking with us while we tackled the problem".

The update will be available March 13 on Xbox 360 and on PlayStation 3 in North America and March 14 for PlayStation 3 users in Europe.